


Aurora

by KinoGlowWorm



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Scientists, Astronauts, F/F, Gardening, Geology, Graphic Depictions of Flowers, Homesteading, Infidelity, Kinda, Mars, Mila Babicheva/Georgi Popovich (background)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 11:26:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18409691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KinoGlowWorm/pseuds/KinoGlowWorm
Summary: The objective of the Aurora Programme is first to formulate and then to implement a European long-term plan for the robotic and human exploration of solar system bodies holding promise for traces of life. From the dawn of humankind the need to explore has driven expansion across our planet. Today this expansion continues towards other planets in the solar system by means of robotic spacecraft - virtual explorers. But will human expansion continue? In the public consciousness this is only a matter of time.—ESA, Introduction to the Aurora ProgrammeMila is a geologist who has always felt more at home in the field than surrounded by people in cities. What does it mean when life on Mars with a single colleague, an Italian botanist who finds beauty in the agricultural plants she researches, begins to feel more like home than Earth? And what does this mean for the life that waits back home and the clock that will run out?





	Aurora

Mila dragged her heavily-gloved fingers along the eroded striations of the rock face in front of her, as if trying to read across its lines like some kind of complex, arcane text.

“You see, you also study storytelling,” Georgi had told her, not long after they had first met. Mila had been describing her upcoming field work in Oman, examining the rocks for patterns holding evidence of rifting around the edge of the prehistoric Tethys Sea. “Many more of us do than realize it.” 

He wasn’t wrong, she’d just never thought about it that way before.

The way the bare rocks rose around her and caught in uneven pieces under her feet reminded her as much of her time in Oman as anywhere on she’d been on Earth, if she could imagine spending the day in twilight. 

The night was still the night, though.

The eerie blue of the sunset started to creep up what of the horizon she could see at the edge of the canyon, and Mila packed up the last samples into the hard case on the back of the rover. She tapped a few notes and coordinates into her dusty tablet, snapping a few more still photos of the area before clipping it to her suit and lifting herself up into the seat.

She paused as she reached for the button to start the engine, reaching for the tablet again and holding it out to blindly take a picture of herself, smiling from behind her visor. The special, ultra-ruggedized case on it blocked the front-facing camera that had been deemed unnecessary.

“On my way home,” she dictated before thinking better of the last word and striking it. She tried again, hearing herself switch into her clear-cornered professional voice, “On my way back to base,” and sent it off.

Mila forgot about the others sometimes. Forgot that every message and photo, the video feed from her helmet cam, even her very heart and breath half the time was logged through the station in orbit around the planet, archived precisely by its computer systems. 

The screen blinked back at her with a new message from base.

“Great, I’ll have dinner ready when you get in.” 

Mila smiled warmly back at the message on the screen, sure that the heart monitor in her suit registered the warm flutter inside her that followed. 

Mila forgot about the others sometimes.

The canyon opened up into a wide, rocky plain. Boulders and tall spires dotted the landscape around her, all in the same warm, ruddy tone. A map on the tablet screen in front of her tracked her position back to the base, but she mostly followed what was left of her tracks from this morning, as the day had been fairly still. 

As the rover crept back towards the setting sun, tracks from previous days curved off in different directions around her, each in a slightly different state of being reclaimed by the landscape. 

The tiny hab pod finally came into view, glowing like a beacon on the horizon. 

Field work had always been the thing that had kept her holding on to academia, even if the places her research took her tended towards the world’s more extreme landscapes: Greenland and Oman had made up the majority of that time. There was something freeing about the remoteness of the sites in and of itself. They were places that could swallow her whole, as opposed to pulling her apart to chew her up, the way the busier places in her life did.

Certainly there was the freedom from the bullshit of the constant dick measuring that went on as far as who had gotten published where, which grants and fellowships they had gotten, which big names they had worked with. 

The very openness of the places though, with little to break her focus, was its own sort of comfort though, one that got lost in the noise of the city. Each time, it was a little harder to make herself go back, Georgi and the cat, Varya, notwithstanding. She could never really explain it to Georgi, who thrived on the city. 

She suspected she could explain it to Varya, but Varya wasn’t much of a listener, even for a cat. Ironically, it was part of why she thought the cat might understand. 

Those trips typically only lasted a few weeks, though. Only ever just enough time to really settle into the rhythm of the place before being pulled away again. The longest she’d ever spent in the field at one time before this had been the semester she spent at the Naturinstitut in Greenland, but not all of that was really out in the field. The institute was quieter, less competitive than the other universities she’d worked out of, but the cycle of a few days out, a few weeks back still put distance between her and the land.

Mila couldn’t say precisely how long she had been here, for as much as there was always a screen within arms reach that kept a precise, down to the second count of how long it had been since the landing pod had left the station. The longer that count went, the less it meant anything, though. 

It wasn’t even like the weeks they had spent in space, where there truly were no landmarks in time, such that it didn’t matter. The days it counted were slightly shorter than the ones she was living. The sun rose, the sun set. The Sol counter turned over at seemingly random times, shifting every day. The only thing it could count towards was leaving, and that was still farther out than Mila had to - or wanted to - wrap her head around.

Maybe it was like Georgi had suggested: this was all storytelling, and leaving the field was like being pulled out of a good book to concentrate on writing its footnotes in a crowded room. It wasn’t the whole of it, to be sure, but it was the easiest comparison so far.

The sun was just below the horizon by the time she parked the rover in its shelter and started stomping the dust off of her suit and boots the way that she had during the summers at her grandparents’ dacha. There, she had also measured her day by the rise and set of the sun rather than by the clock.

The antechamber hissed as she stepped inside, waiting for the green light to give her the go ahead to detach her helmet and start taking off the cumbersome outer layer. At least it wasn’t as bulky as the EVA suit, and the planet’s limited gravity took a lot of the sting out of the oxygen tanks strapped to her back.

Sara looked up and smiled warmly from the small table where she was hovering over a small bowl of baby greens as Mila finally stepped into the single room of the hab pod.

“Do you want to see them?” Sara’s face lit up with the question. She’d been so excited she’d sent a picture earlier in the day, captioned with just a series of exclamation points. 

“Of course,” Mila said, letting Sara grab her by the hand and pull her into her own enthusiasm, leading towards the other door into her greenhouse lab.

The rows of pea plants were dotted with small blossoms, the purple and white standing out against the soft green of the leaves as if they created the light in the room rather than reflecting it.

“Have any of Izzy’s bloomed up on the station yet?”

“No, they’re barely starting to bud out.”

“You think it’s just the light or the gravity or-”

“Honestly, I don’t quite know yet.”

“Music’s better here?” Mila smiled, remembering the days they had spent setting up equipment in here after finishing the initial build on the greenhouse, and Sara singing old Italian songs quietly to herself as she worked. Mila caught her at it other times, too, though it had been a while since they’d spent all day working together.

“Oh, don’t be silly,” Sara blushed in response, a smile creeping softly across her face nonetheless. She tugged at Mila’s hand again to pull her closer to the plants, squatting down to bring the flowers to eye level.

Flashes of memory from the time when Mila didn’t have to kneel to be eye level with pea blossoms came to her; the sun warming her bare shoulders as she walked barefoot through the garden. The flowers hadn’t particularly impressed her then; there were much more showy and fragrant choices at the time. They seemed small, even in her child-hands, less exciting than the crisp, sweet peas that would follow, or that she could find digging through the vines growing up the fence with her tiny, deft fingers.

In front of her now, they seemed a tiny miracle, the veins spidering through the delicate outer petals, breaking them into a patchwork of pale purple fading into white before opening up into two full lips, the deep red-purple of them cradling the flower’s hidden center.

“Can I touch it?” Mila breathed, her hand almost to the plant already before remembering that this was one of Sara’s experiments.

“Of course,” Sara giggled lightly beside her as Mila delicately stroked along the seam of the petals, the supple drag like silk along her fingertip.

“Here,” Sara said, pinching one of the blossoms from another vine and holding it out to Mila. The purple at the edge of the flower seemed pale next to the rich purple of Sara’s eyes, and the warmth of her face.

Mila forgot about the others sometimes.

The flower brushed against her lips, still held gently between Sara’s fingers. Uncertainly, Mila opened her mouth just enough to take in the tender morsel, her lips closing around Sara’s warm, work-worn fingertips along with it. 

The fingers slipped quickly from her mouth as Mila began to chew, the flavor sweet and mild on her tongue the way that the peas which would grow later were, if more tender than crisp, flooding her mouth with the memory of green. Her eyes slipped closed as she chewed, and the petals folded together between her teeth as they melted into mild sweetness that tasted more like home than even most of the food she could get in Piter. 

When Mila’s eyes opened, Sara had a sparse handful of blossoms cradled against her chest, and she remembered how hungry she was. 

“I thought I’d add a few to our salad tonight,” she said. “I know they’ll be more exciting once they’re actually peas, but they’re doing so well, and, I don’t know. It’s just nice to see some color around here.”

Mila’s belly rumbled in response and her tongue swept her lips hopefully for any remaining traces.

Sara had already started back up to the central hab pod by the time Mila stumbled to her feet, brushing the hybrid soil from her suit, richer and darker than the ground outside, but still with enough of a ruddy hue to remind her where she was.

The table was pulled down and set by the time Mila re-entered the pod. It was really more of a desk than a table, designed for one person to work at rather than two people to sit and eat. Most of the food they ate - most of the equipment they lived with, for that matter - was designed to work in zero gravity, on the go. 

During the day, the suit limited Mila to sipping nutrient-fortified liquids while she was in the field. Typically, she was busy enough that it didn’t feel like too much of a loss, but it made her hunger for a real meal when she got back that much greater than just what her body required.

Most of the food they ate was pre-packaged - canned or freeze-dried, but part of Sara’s work was to test out approaches to growing supplemental food on planet. Up until today, all that had amounted to was some small salad greens, savored with a small drizzle of the vinegar and olive oil Sara had managed to designate as essential enough to bring with a little support from the Italian government. 

“Sunday,” Sara said, passing her tablet across to Mila to share a picture of a now-familiar table with people crowded around it. Sara’s family, who met for dinner after church each week and recorded a short video greeting for her. The transmission delay varied, but it was always long enough that live communication wasn’t practical the way it had been when they were still in orbit around earth.

Sara tended to take on cooking, such as it was, for the both of them, with her work keeping her in the hab more often than not. There wasn’t actually any expectation they would eat together. The five women on the ship had eaten together occasionally during the nine-month trip from Earth, but mostly as a special occasion - holidays or birthdays. It made for a good promo photo to send back to Earth. 

It was a habit the two of them had only fallen into once it was just the two of them on the ground. The first day Mila had gone out to do extensive surveying, Sara had asked if she wanted her to heat something up for when she got back. The next day, the food had been ready when Mila got back. That had been that. 

Back home, Georgi took care of the food more often than she did. Mila occasionally forgot to eat when she was really in the thick of her work, and when she did cook, she made a large pot of something she could eat for days on end. Georgi’s “cooking” was mostly take-out, but there was the rare, elaborate cooking production he put on that seemed to use every dish in the kitchen. 

For Sara, food was necessarily a social undertaking. She would forget to eat unless there was someone to eat with. Watching her family eat together, seemed unsurprising. The food on the table was present because they were there together. It was so different from Mila’s growing up. Her parents, with their ever-shifting work schedules even when they were together, were rarely in the same place at the same time long enough for a meal. 

Sara’s family were familiar to Mila now, but almost more in the way characters on a TV show were. She wondered how many times she'd seen the same scene at this point: Sara’s brother, also an astronaut, framing the same crowded dining room table, creeping into the edges of the frame himself. Each said something briefly in Italian that Mila couldn’t understand.

It was far more interesting to watch Sara react to their messages than it was to even watch them at this point, as she shook her head and rolled her eyes but kept smiling the whole time, picking through her canned lasagna.

They must have been sending these the whole time Sara had been away, but it was only since they'd landed that it had become part of Mila’s weekly rhythm. It was the closest thing she had to defining a week, such as it was on Earth.

It reminded her that she had gotten something from Georgi earlier that day, too. He wasn’t as consistent as Sara’s family was, but he seemed to take pride in turning each video message into a performance. In many ways, he was as bad at taking off his choreographer hat as Mila was at setting aside hers as a geologist. 

She retrieved her small laptop from near the bed and took the three steps back to the table to sit down while watching. The scene was familiar: Georgi was posed in front of the Indonesian tapestry that hung in their living room, one arm extended dramatically to the side with Varya standing across his shoulders.

Mila cautiously unmuted the laptop to the strains of something bombastic she thought she recognized as something from Swan Lake, cursing under her breath at her own uncertainty.

Sara leaned in aganst her shoulder to peek as soon as the music came on, already smirking in expectation. The music led Georgi through a series of dramatic poses where he encouraged Varya to walk along the planes of his body with mixed success. They giggled as he struggled to keep his professional composure as the cat walked all over him in more ways than one. She stayed on though. Ultimately, he ended folded on the floor with the cat perched on his back like a sleek gray loaf.

The screen faded out and faded back in on him seated, cradling the cat in his arms as he began to deliver a further message.

As she watched, Mila found herself imagining Varya in the hab, seeing her curled up in any number of the built in storage compartments that lined the walls of the pod. Most of them were occupied with supplies, but that wouldn’t deter her. She snorted out a quiet laugh as she imagined the cat scratching into the soil of the greenhouse in lieu of her litter box, the way that her grandparents’ cats used to, remembering her grandmother chasing them out of the garden with a broom. 

In its own way, it would be more like the outdoors than Varya had ever had as a city cat in a series of small apartments.

Georgi’s message wrapped up as he held up a small chalkboard with ‘21 months’ scrawled elegantly across it, and Mila realized she’d stopped listening after the first few words. By context, the significance of the figure was clear; it was how much longer before she was back on Earth and would see him again. Georgi’s smile was hopeful as the video faded out one last time. 

Mila wondered if he was posting the videos publicly anywhere, or if they were just for her. All of the editing and production setup he put into them seemed overkill for just one person. It wouldn’t surprise her either way: he always thrived on an audience, but it would kill him to send something to even one person that wasn’t as polished as he could make it.

Sara drifted back to the computer, working over her data. Mila did likewise, sorting and tagging the samples and photos she’d taken throughout the day as she tried to piece them into a mosaic of the past, imagining the canyon totally flooded, herself floating effortlessly along with the gentle current that pushed through. 

The weightlessness of space was quite different from the weightlessness of the water, for as much as they used the one to train for the other on Earth. Water never truly took the weight away, just held the bulk of it for you, at the exchange of pushing you where it wanted to go. Water had an agenda in a way that space could hardly imagine. 

There were a number of theories about the erosion that had formed the canyon and all of the other structures in this area. Water had always seemed the most compelling, though it didn’t completely obviate the contributions of the sandy windstorms that whipped across the land sometimes. That had been true in Oman as well, though, and it couldn’t erase the rocks’ memory of the sea.

What did it mean for the land to remember? A greenhouse on Mars whispers stories about her baba’s dacha. A canyon here tells a version of the same story as pillars of stone at the edge of the Red Sea. The form of things held a memory deeper than what the mind could hold on its own.

A warm current ran through her and she looked up to see Sara smiling softly across the room at her. She was lifted with a different sort of weightlessness that managed to lift her out of her body and root her in one place simultaneously. She smiled back and they both turned back to their work without exchanging a word. 

Twenty-one months. Nine of those travel back. Twelve months still here, at the dictation of the calendar. The moon - the one you could see, at least, went through its phases with each rise and set - twice for each day, sunrise to sunrise. She hadn’t even had a period since before she left earth, going along with the ESA’s suggestion of an IUD to put that cycle entirely on hiatus for the duration of the mission. This close to the planet’s equator, there wasn’t even that much variation in the length of the day from sunrise to sunset. Each day was much like the same day. The sun rose, the sun set. What was a month between all that?

Each day was the same day, frozen for her and Sara to live over and over again to perfection, to deepen their connection to the world around them, to read the rocks and watch the plants continue to grow.

The night was still the night, though.

The weight of her day in the field pulled at Mila’s shoulders and her eyes and she rolled her neck slowly side to side, breathing deeply. She closed her laptop.

“You going to bed?” Sara asked and Mila simply nodded in response.

“I’ll be there in a few, I just need to finish setting up one more formula to run.”

Mila undressed and crawled into the bunk, the blanket warm but unsatisfyingly thin, settling on her side as her eyelids drooped. Sara crawled in next to her a few minutes later, nestling in tightly along the contours of her body in the tight bunk. Mila wrapped an arm around her middle, her fingers drifting lightly across the soft skin before settling again. Sara’s hair smelled of the soil.

Mila dreamed of two pea blossoms drifting across the surface of the ocean. Two moons chased each other across the sky above, creeping across the sun as it set into a sky as blue as the water. She dreamed of the flowers washed up on the red rocky shore of an island, left there as the sun completed its passage beyond the horizon, leaving them undisturbed.


End file.
